Radware recently introduced its new SIP Director product, an application delivery controller (ADC) based on the company’s award-winning AppDirector solution but designed specifically to optimize the performance, reliability and security of SIP-based applications.
According to company vice president of advanced services David Aviv, the launch of SIP Director is part of a larger move on Radware’s part into the carrier space. The company now derives about 30 to 35 percent of its revenues from the carrier market, and the remaining 65 to 70 percent from enterprises, he says—the point being that as carriers take on more and more converged offerings, they’ll need the kind of control and optimization that SIP Director provides.
And Aviv says that’ll only become increasingly true in the coming years. SIP resolution today, he contends, is in the same stage that HTTP resolution was in the late ’90s. “It’s a core protocol that will enable the entire range of collaborative services… like voice over IP, voicemail, voice and video conferencing, instant messaging, presence, location, data collaboration and 3G for mobile cellular,” he says.
SIP optimization
To optimize and guarantee SIP service delivery, SIP Director monitors network health and re-routes traffic as needed. It also protects against denial of service (DoS) and other attacks with a dynamic, behavior-based security engine that Radware acquired with its purchase of V-Secure Technologies two years ago. And according to Aviv, it’s both easy to configure and highly scalable.
Crucially, the solution also ensures interoperability by serving as a bridge between TCP, UDP, and TLS protocols. “It’s able to terminate any session—UDP, TCP, TLS—and simply convert it to your native core protocol… so we can support any proxy, any server, any back-to-back user agent, any gateway, any client device,” Aviv says.
And the key result of all of this, Aviv says, is improved performance. “When you have a request for SIP, the technology can look at the global resources, pick up the resources from multiple data centers, and allocate the resources… so the user is guaranteed to get the best response time and the best quality for the session being run on the network,” he says.
Supporting service providers
IDC analyst Elisabeth Rainge says SIP Director should be particularly attractive to service providers that are constantly looking for new ways to stay competitive. “By leveraging advanced layer 4-7 policies, SIP Director enables service providers to optimize VoIP and other multimedia traffic flows through granular classification and control,” she says.
In the process of developing SIP Director over the past couple of years, Aviv says, Radware has worked with a wide range of leading service providers and vendors to ensure that their needs would be met—and that includes vendors for everything from applications to signaling to session border controllers (SBCs). While the product will continue to grow, he says, it’s designed to meet the most pressing needs from day one.
“It took us two years of very focused effort… and today we have the most feature-rich solution in the market,” Aviv says.
